I have a 20 gig and a 10 gig drive works ok on the smaller one but get status message in defrag "finding new data" and then restarts from beginning. This is a new drive and maybe I need a new driver. Any Ideas?

Disable screen savers and close all programs while running defrag. That message means something is writing to the hard drive (i.e, a program is being accessed or run.)

I assume the one that it restarts on is the one with windows loaded on it. if the above fails boot into safe mode and run it from there

in safe mode it says that i cant use defrag cause it uses compatibility mode file system. so what can we do? on my comp defragging never reaches 17%, it always restarts... what can be left on ctrl+alt+del screen and what cannot?

Every time I run Scandisk [advanced]it says that it has started for ten times because Windows or another application was writing to disk. But I do close all applications in the bottom right corner before I run scandisk, so what do I do to make it run proper?

I have the exact same problem. I've come to this conclusion. We have larger drives, and most maxtor and western digital drives use a thing called EZ-BIOS on it. You will see it when you start you comp. This takes up a little bit of extra room directly before the master boot record. I beleive the case is, the scandisk finds a larger MBR and desides to scan that as the drive, and then finds the end WAY before it suspects it will and restarts, and after many tries ends up scanning past this "little drive" to the real one. Same in defrag. Only way to correct it. Format the drive manually using FDISK and FORMAT commands.